Mrs. Gaskell

Edna Lyall (1897)

[The following discussion of Gaskell's life and works comes from an 1897 book, Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign: A Book of Appreciations, in which women writers discussed their predecessors. Numbers between brackets indicate page breaks in the orginal text This text comes from Project Gutenberg. — George P. Landow.]

f all the novelists of Queen Victoria's reign there is not one to whom
the present writer turns with such a sense of love and gratitude as to
Mrs. Gaskell. This feeling is undoubtedly shared by thousands of men and
women, for about all the novels there is that wonderful sense of
sympathy, that broad human interest which appeals to readers of every
description. The hard-worked little girl in the schoolroom can forget
the sorrows of arithmetic or the vexations of French verbs as she pores
over Wives and Daughters on a Saturday half-holiday, and, as George
Sand remarked to Lord Houghton, this same book, Wives and Daughters,
"would rivet the attention of the most blasé man of the world."

With the exception of her powerful Life of Charlotte Brontë, Mrs.
Gaskell wrote only novels or short stories.[119/120]
The enormous difficulties
which attended the writing of a biography of the author of Jane Eyre
would, we venture to think, have baffled any other writer of that time.
It is easy now, years after Charlotte Brontë's death, to criticise the
wisdom of this or that page, to hunt up slight mistakes, to maintain
that in some details Mrs. Gaskell was wrong. To be wise too late is an
easy and, to some apparently, a most grateful task; but it would,
nevertheless, be hard to find a biography of more fascinating interest,
or one which more successfully grappled with the great difficulty of the
undertaking.

As Mr. Clement Shorter remarks, the Life of Charlotte Brontë "ranks
with Boswell's Life of Johnson and Lockhart's Life of Scott." It is
pleasant, too, to read Charlotte Brontë's own words in a letter to Mr.
Williams, where she mentions her first letter from her future friend and
biographer:

The letter you forwarded this morning was from Mrs. Gaskell, authoress
of 'Mary Barton.' She said I was not to answer it, but I cannot help
doing so. The note brought the tears to my eyes. She is a good, she is a
great woman. Proud am I that I can touch a chord of sympathy in souls so
noble. In Mrs. Gaskell's nature it mournfully pleases me to fancy a
remote affinity to my sister Emily. In Miss Martineau's mind I have
always [120/121] felt the same, though there are wide differences. Both these
ladies are above me — certainly far my superiors in attainments and
experience. I think I could look up to them if I knew them."

For lovers of the author of Mary Barton it is hard, however, not to
feel a grudge against the Life of Charlotte Brontë — or, rather, the
reception accorded to it. Owing to the violent attacks to which it gave
rise, to a threatened action for libel on the part of some of those
mentioned in the book, and to the manifold annoyances to which the
publication of the Biography subjected the writer, Mrs. Gaskell
determined that no record of her own life should be written.

It is pleasant to find that there were gleams of light mixed with the
many vexations. Charles Kingsley writes to Mrs. Gaskell in warm appreciation of the Life:

"Be sure," he says, "that the book will do good. It will shame literary
people into some stronger belief that a simple, virtuous, practical
home-life is consistent with high imaginative genius; and it will shame,
too, the prudery of a not over-cleanly, though carefully whitewashed,
age, into believing that purity is now (as in all ages till now) quite
compatible with the knowledge of evil. I confess that the book has made
me ashamed of myself. Jane Eyre I hardly looked into, very seldom
reading a work [121/122] of fiction — yours, indeed, and Thackeray's are the only
ones I care to open. 'Shirley' disgusted me at the opening, and I gave
up the writer and her books with the notion that she was a person who
liked coarseness. How I misjudged her! and how thankful I am that I
never put a word of my misconceptions into print, or recorded my
misjudgments of one who is a whole heaven above me. Well have you done
your work, and given us a picture of a valiant woman made perfect by
sufferings. I shall now read carefully and lovingly every word she has
written."

Mrs. Gaskell's wish regarding her own biography has, of course, been
respected by her family; but the world is the poorer, and it is
impossible not to regret that the life of so dearly loved a writer must
never be attempted.

The books reveal a mind as delicately pure as a child's, wedded to that
true mother's heart which is wide enough to take in all the needy.
Looking, moreover, at that goodly row of novels — whether in the dear old
shabby volumes that have been read and re-read for years, or in that
dainty little set recently published in a case, which the rising
generation can enjoy — one cannot help reflecting that here is "A Little
Child's Monument," surely the most beautiful memorial of a great love
and a [122/123] great grief that could be imagined. It was not until the death of
her little child — the only son of the family — that Mrs. Gaskell,
completely broken down by grief, began, at her husband's suggestion, to
write. And thus a great sorrow brought forth a rich and wonderful
harvest, as grief borne with strength and courage always may do; and the
world has good reason to remember that little ten months' child whose
short life brought about such great results.

A question naturally suggests itself at this point as to Mrs. Gaskell's
birth and education. How far had she inherited her literary gifts? And
in what way had her mind been influenced by the surroundings of her
childhood and girlhood? Her mother, Mrs. Stevenson, was a Miss Holland,
of Sandlebridge, in Cheshire; her father — William Stevenson — was at
first classical tutor in the Manchester Academy, and later on, during
his residence in Edinburgh, was editor of the Scots Magazine and a
frequent contributor to the Edinburgh Review. He was next appointed
Keeper of the Records to the Treasury, an appointment which caused his
removal from Edinburgh to Chelsea; and it was there, in Cheyne Row, that
Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson, the future novelist, was born.

Owing to the death of her mother, she was adopted when only a month old
by her aunt, Mrs. Lumb, and [123/124] taken to Knutsford, in Cheshire, the little
town so wonderfully described in "Cranford." For two years in her
girlhood she was educated at Stratford-on-Avon, walking in the flowery
meadows where Shakspere once walked, worshipping in the stately old
church where he worshipped, and where he willed that his body should be
left at rest; nor is it possible to help imagining that the associations
of that ideal place had an influence on the mind of the future writer,
doing something to give that essentially English tone which
characterises all her books.

After her father's second marriage she went to live with him, and her
education was superintended by him until his death in 1829, when she
once more returned to Knutsford. Here, at the age of twenty-two, she was
married to the Rev. William Gaskell, M.A., of Cross Street Chapel,
Manchester; and Manchester remained her home ever after.

Such are the brief outlines of a life story which was to have such a
wide and lasting influence for good. For nothing is more striking than
this when we think over the well-known novels — they are not only
consummate works of art, full of literary charm, perfect in style and
rich with the most delightful humour and pathos — they are books from
which that morbid lingering over the loathsome [124/125] details of vice, those
sensuous descriptions of sin too rife in the novels of the present day,
are altogether excluded.

Not that the stories are namby-pamby, or unreal in any sense; they are
wholly free from the horrid prudery, the Pharisaical temper, which makes
a merit of walking through life in blinkers and refuses to know of
anything that can shock the respectable. Mrs. Gaskell was too genuine an
artist to fall either into this error or into the error of bad taste and
want of reserve. She drew life with utter reverence; she held the
highest of all ideals, and she dared to be true.

How tender and womanly and noble, for instance, is her treatment of the
difficult subject which forms the motif of Ruth! How sorrowfully
true to life is the story of the dressmaker's apprentice with no place
in which to spend her Sunday afternoons! We seem ourselves to breathe
the dreadful "stuffy" atmosphere of the workroom, to feel the dreary
monotony of the long day's work. It is so natural that the girl's fancy
should be caught by Henry Bellingham, who was courteous to her when she
mended the torn dress of his partner at the ball; so inevitable that she
should lose her heart to him when she witnessed his gallant rescue of
the drowning child. But her fall was not inevitable, and one of the
finest bits in the whole novel is the description of Ruth's hesitation [125/126]
in the inn parlour when, finding herself most cruelly and unjustly cast
off by her employer, she has just accepted her lover's suggestion that
she shall go with him to London, little guessing what the promise
involved, yet intuitively feeling that her consent had been unwise.

Ruth became as hot as she had previously been cold, and went and opened
the window, and leant out into the still, sweet evening air. The bush of
sweetbriar underneath the window scented the place, and the delicious
fragrance reminded her of her old home. I think scents affect and
quicken the memory even more than either sights or sounds; for Ruth had
instantly before her eyes the little garden beneath the window of her
mother's room, with the old man leaning on his stick watching her, just
as he had done not three hours before on that very afternoon." She
remembers the faithful love of the old labouring man and his wife who
had served her parents in their lifetime, and for their sake would help
and advise her now. Would it not be better to go to them?

She put on her bonnet and opened the parlour door; but then she saw the
square figure of the landlord standing at the open house door, smoking
his evening pipe, and looming large and distinct against the dark air
and landscape beyond. Ruth remembered the cup of tea that she had drunk;
it must be paid for, and she had no money with [126/127] her. She feared that he
would not let her leave the house without paying. She thought that she
would leave a note for Mr. Bellingham saying where she was gone, and how
she had left the house in debt, for (like a child) all dilemmas appeared
of equal magnitude to her; and the difficulty of passing the landlord
while he stood there, and of giving him an explanation of the
circumstances, appeared insuperable, and as awkward and fraught with
inconvenience as far more serious situations. She kept peeping out of
her room after she had written her little pencil note, to see if the
outer door was still obstructed. There he stood motionless, enjoying his
pipe, and looking out into the darkness which gathered thick with the
coming night. The fumes of the tobacco were carried into the house and
brought back Ruth's sick headache. Her energy left her; she became
stupid and languid, and incapable of spirited exertion; she modified her
plan of action to the determination of asking Mr. Bellingham to take her
to Milham Grange, to the care of her humble friends, instead of to
London. And she thought in her simplicity that he would instantly
consent when he had heard her reasons.

The selfishness of the man who took advantage of her weakness and
ignorance is finely drawn because it is not at all exaggerated. Henry
Bellingham is no monster of [127/128] wickedness, but a man with many fine
qualities spoilt by an over-indulgent and unprincipled mother, and
yielding too easily to her worldly-wise arguments.

Ruth first sees a faint trace of his selfishness — she calls it
"unfairness" — when, on their arrival in Wales, he persuades the landlady
to give them rooms in the hotel and to turn out on a false pretext some
other guests into the dépendance across the road. She understands his
selfish littleness of soul only too well when, years after, she talks to
him during that wonderfully described interview in the chapter called
"The Meeting on the Sands." He cannot in the least understand her. "The
deep sense of penitence she expressed he took for earthly shame, which
he imagined he could soon soothe away." He actually has the audacity to
tempt her a second time; then, after her indignant refusal, he offers
her marriage. To his great amazement she refuses this too. "Why, what on
earth makes you say that?" asked he....

“I do not love you. I did once. Don't say I did not love you then; but I
do not now. I could never love you again. All you have said and done
since you came to Abermouth has only made me wonder how I ever could
have loved you. We are very far apart; the time that has pressed down my
life like brands of hot iron, and scarred me for ever, has been nothing
to you. You have talked [128/129] of it with no sound of moaning in your voice,
no shadow over the brightness of your face; it has left no sense of sin
on your conscience, while me it haunts and haunts; and yet I might plead
that I was an ignorant child; only I will not plead anything, for God
knows all. But this is only one piece of our great difference.”

“You mean that I am no saint," he said, impatient at her speech.
"Granted. But people who are no saints have made very good husbands
before now. Come, don't let any morbid, overstrained conscientiousness
interfere with substantial happiness — happiness both to you and to
me — for I am sure I can make you happy — ay! and make you love me too, in
spite of your pretty defiance.... And here are advantages for Leonard,
to be gained by you quite in a holy and legitimate way."

She stood very erect.

“If there was one thing needed to confirm me, you have named it. You
shall have nothing to do with my boy by my consent, much less by my
agency. I would rather see him working on the roadside than leading such
a life — being such a one as you are.... If at last I have spoken out too
harshly and too much in a spirit of judgment, the fault is yours. If
there were no other reason to prevent our marriage but the one fact that
it would bring Leonard into contact with you, that would be enough.” [129/130]

Later on, a fever visits the town, and Ruth becomes a nurse. When she
hears that the father of her child is ill and untended she volunteers to
nurse him, and, being already worn out with work, she dies in
consequence. The man's smallness of mind, his contemptible selfishness,
are finely indicated in the scene where he goes to look at Ruth as she
lies dead.

He was "disturbed" by the distress of the old servant Sally, and saying,
"Come, my good woman! we must all die," tries to console her with a
sovereign!!

The old servant turns upon him indignantly, then "bent down and kissed
the lips from whose marble, unyielding touch he recoiled even in
thought." At that moment the old minister, who had sheltered Ruth in her
trouble, enters. Henry makes many offers to him as to providing for
Ruth's child, Leonard, and says, "I cannot tell you how I regret that
she should have died in consequence of her love to me." But from gentle
old Mr. Benson he receives only an icy refusal, and the stern words,
"Men may call such actions as yours youthful follies. There is another
name for them with God."

The sadness of the book is relieved by the delightful humour of Sally,
the servant. The account of the wooing of Jeremiah Dixon is a
masterpiece; and Sally's hesitation when, having found her proof against
the attractions of [130/131] "a four-roomed house, furniture conformable, and
eighty pounds a year," her lover mentions the pig that will be ready for
killing by Christmas, is a delicious bit of comedy.

“Well, now! would you believe it? the pig were a temptation. I'd a
receipt for curing hams.... However, I resisted. Says I, very stern,
because I felt I'd been wavering, 'Master Dixon, once for all, pig or no
pig, I'll not marry you.”

The description of the minister's home is very beautiful. Here are a few
lines which show in what its charm consisted:

In the Bensons' house there was the same unconsciousness of individual
merit, the same absence of introspection and analysis of motive, as
there had been in her mother; but it seemed that their lives were pure
and good not merely from a lovely and beautiful nature, but from some
law the obedience to which was of itself harmonious peace, and which
governed them.... This household had many failings; they were but human,
and, with all their loving desire to bring their lives into harmony with
the will of God, they often erred and fell short. But somehow the very
errors and faults of one individual served to call out higher
excellences in another; and so they reacted upon each other, and the
result of short discords was exceeding harmony and peace. [131/132]

The publication of Ruth, with its brave, outspoken words, its fearless
demand for one standard of morality for men and women, subjected the
author to many attacks, as we may gather from the following warm-hearted
letter by Charles Kingsley:

July 25, 1853.

I am sure that you will excuse my writing to you thus abruptly
when you read the cause of my writing. I am told, to my great
astonishment, that you had heard painful speeches on account of
'Ruth'; what was told me raised all my indignation and disgust....
Among all my large acquaintance I never heard, or have heard, but
one unanimous opinion of the beauty and righteousness of the book,
and that above all from really good women. If you could have heard
the things which I heard spoken of it this evening by a thorough
High Church, fine lady of the world, and by her daughter, too, as
pure and pious a soul as one need see, you would have no more
doubt than I have, that, whatsoever the 'snobs' and the bigots may
think, English people, in general, have but one opinion of 'Ruth,'
and that is, one of utter satisfaction. I doubt not you have had
this said to you already often. Believe me, you may have it said
to you as often as you will by the purest and most [132/133] refined of
English women. May God bless you, and help you to write many more
such books as you have already written, is the fervent wish of
your very faithful servant,

Mary Barton, which was the first of the novels, was published in 1848,
and this powerful and fascinating story at once set Mrs. Gaskell in the
first rank of English novelists. People differed as to the views set
forth in the book, but all were agreed as to its literary force and its
great merits. Like Alton Locke, it has done much to break down class
barriers and make the rich try to understand the poor; and when we see
the great advance in this direction which has been made since the date
of its publication, we are able partly to realise how startling the
first appearance of such a book must have been. The secret of the
extraordinary power which the book exercises on its readers is,
probably, that the writer takes one into the very heart of the life she
is describing. [133/134]

Most books of the sort fail to arrest our attention. Why? Because they
are written either as mere "goody" books for parish libraries, and are
carefully watered down lest they should prove too sensational and
enthralling; or because they are written by people who have only a
surface knowledge of the characters they describe and the life they
would fain depict. David Copperfield is probably the most popular book
Dickens ever wrote, and is likely to outlive his other works, just
because he himself knew so thoroughly well all that his hero had to pass
through, and could draw from real knowledge the characters in the
background. And at the present time we are all able to understand the
Indian Mutiny in a way that has never been possible before, because Mrs.
Steel in her wonderful novel, On the Face of the Waters, has, through
her knowledge of native life, given us a real insight into the heart of
a great nation. [134/135]

Brilliant trash may succeed for two or three seasons, but unless there
is in it some germ of real truth which appeals to the heart and
conscience it will not live. Sensationalism alone will not hold its
ground. There must be in the writer a real deep inner knowledge of his
subject if the book is to do its true work. And we venture to think that
Mary Barton, which for nearly half a century has been influencing
people all over the world, owes its vitality very largely to the fact
that Mrs. Gaskell knew the working people of Manchester, not as a
professional doler out of tracts or charitable relief, not in any
detestable, patronising way, but knew them as friends.

This surely is the reason why the characters in the novel are so
intensely real. What could be finer than the portrait of Mary herself,
from the time when we are first introduced to her as the young
apprentice to a milliner and dressmaker, to the end of the book, when
she has passed through her great agony? How entirely the reader learns
to live with her in her brave struggle to prove her lover's innocence!
One of the most powerful parts of the book is the description of her
plucky pursuit of the good ship John Cropper, on board of which was
the only man who could save her lover's life by proving an alibi. [135/136]

But it is not only the leading characters that are so genuine and so
true to life. Old Ben Sturgis, the boat-man, rough of speech but with
more heart than many a smooth-tongued talker; his wife, who sheltered
Mary when she had no notion what manner of woman she was; Job Legh, who
proved such a good friend to both hero and heroine in their trouble, and
whose well-meaning deception of old Mrs. Wilson is so humorously
described; John Barton, the father, with the mournful failure at the
close of his upright life; old Mr. Carson, the rich father of the
murdered man, with his thirst for vengeance, and his tardy but real
forgiveness, when he let himself be led by a little child — all these are
living men and women, not puppets; while in the character and the tragic
story of poor Esther we see the fruits of the writer's deep knowledge of
the life of those she helped when released from gaol.

But Mrs. Gaskell looked on both sides of the question. In North and
South, published in 1855, she deals with the labour question from the
master's standpoint, and in Mr. Thornton draws a most striking picture
of a manufacturer who is just and well-meaning — one who really respects
and cares for the men he employs. The main interest of this book lies,
however, in the character of the heroine, Margaret, who is placed in a
most cruel dilemma by a ne'er-do-well brother whom she shields. By far
the most dramatic scene is that in which, to enable Frederick to escape,
Margaret tells a deliberate falsehood to the detective who is in search
of him. The torture of mind she suffers afterwards for having uttered
this intentional lie, and the difficult question whether under any
circumstances a lie is warrantable, are dealt with in the writer's most
powerful way. [136/137]

In 1853 — the same year in which Ruth was published — the greatest of
all Mrs. Gaskell's works appeared, the inimitable Cranford. For humour
and for pathos we have nothing like this in all the Victorian
literature. It is a book of which one can never tire: yet it can
scarcely be said to have a plot at all, being just the most delicate
miniature painting of a small old-fashioned country town and its
inhabitants. What English man or woman is there, however, who will not
read and re-read its pages with laughter and tears?

Cranford is said to be in many respects the Knutsford of Mrs. Gaskell's
childhood and youth, and there is something so wonderfully lifelike in
the descriptions of the manners and customs of the very select little
community that one is inclined to believe that there is truth in the
assertion. They were gently bred, those old Cranford folk, with their
"elegant economy," their hatred of all display, and their considerate
tact. There is pathos as well as fun in the description of Mrs.
Forrester pretending not to know what cakes were sent up "at a party in
her baby-house of a dwelling ... though she knew, and we knew, and she
knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been
busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes! "[137/138]

There is an air of leisure and peacefulness in every page of the book,
for there was no hurrying life among those dignified old people. "I had
often occasion to notice the use that was made of fragments and small
opportunities in Cranford: the rose-leaves that were gathered ere they
fell to make into a pot-pourri for some one who had no garden; the
little bundles of lavender-flowers sent to some town-dweller. Things
that many would despise, and actions which it seemed scarcely worth
while to perform, were all attended to in Cranford."

Dear old Miss Matty, however, with her reverence for the stronger
sister, and her love affair of long ago, has a closer hold on the heart
of the reader. The description of the meeting of the former lovers is
idyllic; and when Thomas Holbrook dies unexpectedly, soon after, the
woman whose love-story had been spoilt by the home authorities reverses
her own ordinance against "followers" in the case of Martha, the
maid-servant, but otherwise makes no sign. [139/139]

Miss Matty made a strong effort to conceal her feelings — a concealment
she practised even with me, for she has never alluded to Mr. Holbrook
again, though the book he gave her lies with her Bible on the little
table by her bedside. She did not think I heard her when she asked the
little milliner of Cranford to make her caps something like the
Honourable Mrs. Jamieson's, or that I noticed the reply:

“But she wears widows' caps, ma'am!”

“Oh? I only meant something in that style; not widows', of course, but
rather like Mrs. Jamieson's.” [139/140]

In the whole book there is not a character that we cannot vividly
realise: the Honourable (but sleepy) Mrs. Jamieson; brisk, cheerful Lady
Glenmire, who married the sensible country doctor and sacrificed her
title to become plain Mrs. Hoggins; Miss Pole, who always with withering
scorn called ghosts "indigestion," until the night they heard of the
headless lady who had been seen wringing her hands in Darkness Lane,
when, to avoid "the woebegone trunk," she with tremulous dignity offered
the sedan chairman an extra shilling to go round another way! Captain
Brown with his devotion to the writings of Mr. Boz and his feud with
Miss Jenkyns as to the superior merits of Dr. Johnson; and Peter, the
long-lost brother, who from first to last remains an inveterate
practical joker. One and all they become our life-long friends, while
the book stands alone as a perfect picture of English country town
society fifty years ago.

Mrs. Gaskell's shorter stories are scarcely equal to the novels, yet
some of them are very beautiful. "Cousin Phillis," for example, gives
one more of the real atmosphere of country life than any other writer
except Wordsworth. We seem actually to smell the new-mown hay as we read
the story.

Charming, too, is "My Lady Ludlow" with her genteel horror of dissenters
subdued in the end by her genuine good feeling. How often one has longed
for that comfortable square pew of hers in the parish church, in which,
if she did not like the sermon, she would pull up a glass window as
though she had been in her coach, and shut out the sound of the
obnoxious preacher! But, with all her peculiarities, she was the most
courteous of women — a lady in the true sense of the word — and when
people smiled at a shy and untaught visitor who spread out her
handkerchief on the front of her dress as the footman handed her coffee,
my Lady Ludlow with infinite tact and grace promptly spread her
handkerchief exactly in the same fashion which the tradesman's wife had
adopted. [140/141]

Among the short tragic stories, the most striking is one called "The
Crooked Branch," in which the scene at the assizes has almost unrivalled
power; while among the lighter short stories, "My French Master," with
its delicate portraiture of the old refugee, and "Mr. Harrison's
Confessions," the delightfully written love-story of a young country
doctor, are perhaps the most enjoyable.

In 1863 the novel Sylvia's Lovers was published, and although, by its
fine description of old Whitby and the pathos of the story, it has won
many admirers, we infinitely prefer its successor, Wives and
Daughters. There is something very sad in the thought that this last
and best of the writer's stories was left unfinished; but happily very
little remained to be told, and that little was tenderly touched in to
the almost perfect picture of English home life by the daughter who had
been not only Mrs. Gaskell's child but her friend. "Wives and Daughters
will always remain as a true and vivid and powerful study of life and
character; while Molly Gibson, with her loyal heart and sweet sunshiny
nature, will, we venture to think, better represent the majority of
English girls than the happily abnormal Dodos and Millicent Chynes of
present-day fashion. [141/142]

In Mr. Gibson's second wife the author has given us a most subtle study
of a thoroughly selfish and false-hearted woman, and she is made all the
more repulsive because of her outward charms, her soft seductive voice
and her lavish employment of terms of endearment. Wonderfully clever,
too, is the study of poor little Cynthia, her daughter, whose relations
to Molly are most charmingly drawn.

The story was just approaching its happy and wholesome ending, and the
difficulties which had parted Roger Hamley and Molly had just
disappeared, when death summoned the writer from a world she had done so
much to brighten and to raise. On Sunday evening, November 12, 1865,
Mrs. Gaskell died quite suddenly at Holybourne, Alton, Hampshire, a
house which she had recently bought as a surprise for her husband. Sad
as such a death must always be for those who are left behind, one can
imagine nothing happier than "death in harness" for a worker who loves
his work.

.... There's rest above.
Below let work be death, if work be love!"

Her "last days," wrote one of those who knew her best, "had been full of
loving thought and tender help for others. She was so sweet and dear and
noble beyond words." That is the summing-up of the whole; and, after
all, what better could a long biography give us? The motto of all of us
should surely be the words of Mme. Viardot Garcia: "First I am a woman
... then I am an artist." And assuredly Mrs. Gaskell's life was ruled on
those lines.

"It was wonderful" — wrote her daughter, Mrs. Holland, in a letter to me
the other day — "how her writing [142/143] never interfered with her social or
domestic duties. I think she was the best and most practical housekeeper
I ever came across, and the brightest, most agreeable hostess, to say
nothing of being everything as a mother and friend. She combined both,
being my mother and greatest friend in a way you do not often, I think,
find between mother and daughter."

Some people are fond of rashly asserting that the ideal wife and mother
cares little and knows less about the world beyond the little world of
home. Mrs. Gaskell, however, took a keen interest in the questions of
the day, and was a Liberal in politics; while it is quite evident that
neither these wider interests nor her philanthropic work tended to
interfere with the home life, which was clearly of the noblest type.

The friend as well as the mother of her children, the sharer of all her
husband's interests, she yet found time to use to the utmost the great
literary gift that had been entrusted to her; while her sympathy for
those in trouble was shown not only in the powerful pleading of her
novels, but in quiet, practical work in connection with prisoners. She
was one of the fellow labourers of Thomas Wright, the well-known prison
philanthropist, and was able to help in finding places for young girls
who had been discharged from prison. For working women she also held [143/144]
classes, and both among the poor and the rich had many close
friendships.

How far the characters in the novels were studied from life is a
question which naturally suggests itself; and Mrs. Holland replies to it
as follows: "I do not think my mother ever consciously took her
characters from special individuals, but we who knew often thought we
recognised people, and would tell her, 'Oh, so and so is just like Mr.
Blank,' or something of that kind; and she would say, 'So it is, but I
never meant it for him.' And really many of the characters are from
originals, or rather are like originals, but they were not consciously
meant to be like."

For another detail which will interest Mrs. Gaskell's fellow workers I
am indebted to the same source:

Sometimes she planned her novels more or less beforehand, but in many
cases, certainly in that of Wives and Daughters, she had very little
plot made beforehand, but planned her story as she wrote. She generally
wrote in the morning, but sometimes late at night, when the house was
quiet.

Few writers, we think, have exercised a more thoroughly wholesome
influence over their readers than Mrs. Gaskell. Her books, with their
wide human sympathies, their tender comprehension of human frailty,
their bright flashes of humour and their infinite pathos, seem to plead
with us to [144/145] love one another. Through them all we seem to hear the
author's voice imploring us to "seize the day" and to "make friends," as
she does in actual words at the close of one of her Christmas stories,
adding pathetically: "I ask it of you for the sake of that old angelic
song, heard so many years ago by the shepherds, keeping watch by night
on Bethlehem Heights."